Tuesday, December 28, 2010

As you know from my last post, I've had a rather rough holiday season. I've been assisting the family in dealing with the aftermath, and have had to take time off of work and basically skip on the standard Christmas season activities.

I bought my Christmas tree two days before Christmas. We didn't decorate it until Christmas Day.

I did all of my Christmas gift shopping on Christmas day -- thanks to secular big-box corporation department stores who's only god is the almighty $$ who were open all day on the 25th.

Instead, I've been helping to sort through the belongings of my friend...and read through almost ten years worth of hand written journal entries and letters documenting his despair, depression and angst. Interspersed amongst his writings, were occasional letters written by his ex-wife and his ex-girlfriends.

The one thing I can say is a common theme on this whole clusterfuck of a tragedy is the notion that all parties involved sought to have everything, and in the end, ended up with nothing but heartache and pain.

My friend was a player before I even knew what that term meant, or even heard of the internet and the entire world of "pickup artists" found online in 2010. He was the guy that always had multiple girlfriends, and he cheated on them all. He was the epitome of a bad boy, rock & roll-lifestyle player. Sex, drugs and rock & roll were his credo, and he lived it to the bitter end.

It was the basis for the beginning of our friendship when I was a young man. He was the older influence...the big brother I never had. He introduced me to the world of hedonism full tilt, and I embraced it in my youth. He was the guy my friends and I all looked up to, because he had a way with the ladies, and we all wanted to be like him in that regard.

Yet, as I grew older, I saw the inevitable dead end such a lifestyle ended up, and changed my path in life to avoid a similar fate. I quit doing drugs and resisted cheating on my girlfriends. I tried to get him to do the same...but he ignored my counsel. Afterall, I was just the little brother who didn't know what he was talking about. He could handle it, he knew what he was doing.

I saw him break many women's hearts...and invariably break his own in the process.

You see, he was a natural player...but a romantic at heart who endlessly searched for his "soul mate." When he managed to score a woman who he decided was "the one" he would invert the alpha player script and go into full-blown, needy beta-sap mode. All of his writings are rife with poetry, love songs and letters to his ex wife and ex-girlfriends...all the women who I can plainly discern, were attracted to the bad boy alpha, than disgusted and turned off by the needy, dependent pedestalizing beta he turned into once he decided she "was the one." The quest for a soul mate caused him to pedestalize any woman he got into a LTR with.

In reading years worth of his writings, I found a pattern to all of his failed relationships. His alpha personality traits involved in seducing women were highly attractive to the women when they first began their relationships. But he eventually fell into a little-boy-dependent on his mommy relationship, killing the 'gina tingles and killing any respect they had for him. Then they would stop having sex with him...so he'd eventually go out and seek casual sex with druggie sluts to relive his blue balls.

You cannot be a PUA and a Father-Husband Patriarch at the same time...living a double life in which lies and dishonesty are required to try and maintain the facade of a "normal" home life while trying to live the sex, drugs, rock and roll nightlife while the wife or girlfriend is at home with the children.

He tried to have it all...and in the end, he lost it all.

Conversely, the women who entered into these relationships knew damn well he was a player. They tried to turn a bad boy player who gave them 'gina tingles into a monogamous husband provider.

They too tried to have it all. His ex-wife was -- no, IS -- a good woman. But her rationalization hamster and basic female solipsism made her rationalize and justify his past transgressions time and time again. Despite the years of lying and cheating, she married him and had children with him, despite his serial cheating and lying to her while they were dating.

She tried to make a player into a husband and father. Eventually, she woke up to the fact that no matter what she did, she was not going to change him. She left him, and I don't blame her for it one bit. He treated her like crap, and she took it for years. But even though a good woman can delude herself into staying in an LTR that is fundamentally dishonest and abusive, once the 'gina tingles are gone, she will eventually ignore the rationalization hamster and leave.

After she left, what followed was years of one night stands, booty calls and friends with benefits combined with multiple failed LTR's with various girlfriends.

But the biggest mistake he made was trying to turn a druggie whore ex-con into a housewife. She moved in with him and they had a couple of kids...and, like all of his previous LTRs, she left him when he became needy and dependent, and she lost her attraction to him, and he cheated, and she found out....

She was hurt. And she wanted to return that hurt the best way she knew how - parental alienation combined with court ordered child support and violating his visitations. He hurt her, so she used their kids as a weapon to hurt him back. He had to pay for his children, yet he couldn't even speak with them. He got laid off of work, but his child support obligations were decided by imputed income.

Monday, December 20, 2010

NEW YORK, Mar 15 (Reuters Health) -- Divorced or separated men are more than twice as likely to commit suicide as men who remain married, a US researcher reports.

But divorce and separation do not appear to affect suicide risk in women, according to Dr. Augustine J. Kposowa, of the University of California at Riverside.

Kposowa examined the link between suicide and marital status using data on nearly 472,000 men and women included in the National Longitudinal Mortality study. Between 1979 and 1989, 545 of these individuals committed suicide.

``Men were nearly 4.8 times as likely to commit suicide as women,'' the researcher writes in the March 15th issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Whites were at greater risk of suicide than African Americans, and individuals with household incomes between $5,000 and $9,999 were more likely to commit suicide than others. Suicide rates were also higher in older age groups, especially those aged 65 and older, and in residents of Western states.

In addition, divorce or marital separation more than doubled the risk of suicide in men, whereas in women, marital status was unrelated to suicide.

Kposowa suspects that this difference is related to the social networks men and women form outside their marriages, which may be stronger or more meaningful in women than in men.

``Women have better ways of communicating,'' Kposowa told Reuters Health in an interview. ``They may have more social support networks, friends and relatives that they talk to, whereas men don't have social support networks.''

Kposowa is looking at the data and missing the obvious by resorting to the old canard that "women are the better communicators," and that they "form stronger and more meaningful social networks."

Absolute horseshit.

I suspect that this difference is related to a family court system and domestic violence policies that allows a divorcing woman to use the police and the courts to deny access, visitation or even meaningful conversations over the telephone with a man's children.

Than the courts order child support that literally takes more income than the man can survive on, and he cannot pay for his things like property taxes to try and meet his child support obligations - despite not being able to see, talk to or hear from his children.

Soon, faced with the prospect of inevitable homelessness thanks to excessive child support, and slapped with a FIVE YEAR restraining order forbidding any contact with the ex-wife or the pre-adolescent children. FIVE FUCKING YEARS.

When next you're allowed to see your 8 year old daughter, she would be 13?

Men in this situation see no hope in living. So they give up, and take their own life.

It's not because they don't have enough friends, or meaningful social networks.

It's because they are cut off from that which they value more than their own lives: their flesh and blood offspring.

That is why divorced men are far more likely to kill themselves than divorced women.

I've seen this up close and real personal this past week.

My long time high school buddy is now just another statistic.

A statistic that is casually dismissed by gyno-centric researchers as the man's fault for not building up strong enough social networks and the male's inability to "communicate."

My friend had no problem communicating at all. In fact, he communicated extensively. I have now spent hours going through and reading his letters to his enstranged ex-wife. I read his letters to his children who the mother tried her hardest to alienate them from him, despite their very young ages. Most of all, I read his letters to himself, detailing all that he was feeling and experiencing as he went through the slow motion tragedy of being divested of his family and forced into onerous child support servitude so that the mother of his children would not have to go to work to pay for her car maintenance and car insurance. He was going to lose the house he inherited from his deceased parents because he couldn't keep up with the child support and the property taxes...while she lived in her parent's house and received food stamps and welfare.

This shit that we all blog about in the masculine blogosphere? It's very, very, very real.

And very serious. Behind every statistic, there is a story similar to my friend's, and it plays out every single day in this Post-Patriarchal, feminist-warped dystopia.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Seventeen years ago today, then U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton, signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law.

It must be noted that this was not some liberal Democrat act of malfeasance...as it was ceremonially signed one year earlier on December 17, 1992 by Republican President George H.W. Bush. Which, of course, further illustrates the point I repeatedly expound upon - that the Republicans and the Democrats are essentially two sides of the same coin, and that their supposed platform differences are merely weapons of mass distraction to divide and conquer we the sheeple while both sides continue to institute the Brave New World Order agenda of globalization.

But it became law under Bill, so we must give him the ultimate credit. Monica Lewinsky was not the biggest or best blow job of the 1990's. No, that was the blow job he gave to manufacturing jobs in the U.S. when he signed NAFTA into law.

Oh the irony...As I finished writing that last paragraph, my business phone rang and I've just completed a preliminary conversation with a potential client. His background story stated that he worked for both a big name plumbing and faucet company that has the word "AMERICAN" as part of it's name (I will not say the exact company name...but you can figure it out)....and he just got laid off because this "AMERICAN" company is moving it's factory to Mexico. Prior to that stint, he worked for a prominent lightbulb production factory (another well known brand), that moved to Mexico, necessitating his move to the plumbing factory.

NAFTA opened up Mexico's borders to U.S. businesses. What used to be an $18 per hour manufacturing job in America became a $3 per hour job in Mexico. No manufacturer wishing to remain competitive in America could possibly pay $18-20 per hour here when the same product can be produced right across the border in Mexico for just $3 per hour and then shipped back to the U.S. free of charge.

In the 1992 Presidential Debate between Perot, Clinton and Bush Sr., Ross Perot's very first statement dealt with NAFTA and it's future implications should it be ratified:

That's right at the top of my agenda. We've shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you've served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who've got these one-way trade agreements that we've negotiated over the years and say, "Fellows, we'll take the same deal we gave you." And they'll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we've got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply -- you see, if it was a two-way street -- just couldn't do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

Ross Perot was right. Some may say prophetic. Nah, he was just a smart, successful businessman that understood the ultimate outcome if NAFTA were ratified. It was common freakin' sense.

While there's a lot more to our current economic mess than just NAFTA, it surely has played a significant role in today's present unemployment rates and there disproportionate number of men who don't have any blue collar manufacturing jobs in their home States.

They got sucked down -- and indeed as my phone call a few minutes ago confirmed, are still sucking them down -- to Mexico.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Everybody knows tobacco causes cancer and kills people throughout the world every single day...right?!?!

I've reached a point in my life where as soon as I encounter any thought or idea that supposedly "EVERYBODY KNOWS," I no longer accept it without some critical analysis, research and ruminating before I cautiously accept conventional wisdom as factual truth.

As we now know, most conventional wisdom is usually propaganda and lies that turn into informational cascades to promote the interests of various corporate and government interests to get we the sheeple to do something that invariably benefits them.

And tobacco use and it's supposed connections to cancer and all other sorts of bad health effects, is one of those things that has been pounded into our minds via TV, radio, newspapers, ads, billboards, and public schooling curriculum and other such sources of cultural programming for our entire lives.

I myself used to simply accept this conventional wisdom without a second thought up until about a year or so ago.

I've since read some things that have changed my mind.

First of all, I'm not saying tobacco is perfectly healthy and safe to use...as in all things, moderation is the key. Too much of anything is not good for you, and tobacco appears to be one of those substances that is in fact really easy to use beyond sensible moderation.

However, I do believe the fundamental problem with tobacco use in this day and age is the same problem with our food and water supply - it's been corrupted by big business practices designed to increase their bottom line without regard to the consumers health.

The caption to this posts' illustration I got from an anti-smoking site reads:

"There are over 4,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke and at least 69 of those chemicals are known to cause cancer."

Oh wow...so you're telling me that if I took a seed from a natural, organic tobacco plant, and grew it in my yard, and than harvested the leaf, dried it and smoked it, I'd be ingesting industrial chemicals like cadmium, formaldehyde, arsenic, toluene, hexamine, and methanol?

Somehow, I don't think so.

No...all those chemicals are involved in the mass farming, processing and manufacturing of the typical Big Tobacco cigarette.

Here is the list of 599 additives approved for Big Tobacco makers to use by the FDA...additives that are used in producing almost all major brands of cigarettes. The process of burning these additives along with the tobacco and cigarette paper are what result in the ingesting of up to 4000 different chemicals.

Could this in fact be a major factor in causing lung cancer?

I wouldn't doubt it.

What's funny though, is to see the comment section of this hit piece done on American Spirits, which is purportedly made with 100% organic tobacco (0 additives). The article focuses on the idea that American Spirits is no better than smoking any other cigarette. In a way, this kind of article presents itself as a form of anti-smoking Puritanism...yet I also think it's a deliberate attempt at misdirection.

By saying smoking tobacco will kill you just the same, it's a subversive means of excusing and justifying Big Tobacco's use of 599 additives. The average cigarette addict who internalizes the anti-smoking Puritanical logic, will adopt a devil may care attitude, and simply choose their cigarette based on price and flavor, thinking "what the hell, it's gonna kill me anyways, so I'm not going to pay an extra few dollars for a pack of fancy, organic cigarettes."

Yet if you read the comment section of that article, you'll see a contingent of American Spirit smokers who all swear that they can tell a major difference in their health and addictive cravings when they switched over from commercial, additive--laden cigarettes to 100% natural American Spirits.

Here's one comment that echoed the experiences of several friends of mine:

I've been on the spirits for five days. I smoked Marl. lights for over ten years. In my years since college, I have began smoking less (much less actually, less than half a pack a day in the past few years) despite cutting back, I still had horrible "smokers cough".

So far, my opinion is that Spirits are smoother, taste better, and I have not noticed coughing at all (and it's 25 degrees outside right now, usually a really bad time to cough anyway). And I have been smoking even fewer a day.

Now, all the non-smokers reading this, I'm not saying that smoking American Spirits has cured my cough. But, it has disappeared, I'm talking about the nasty throat clearing cough, not from a common cold, this was something I used to do year round with the Marlboro's.

I had one good friend who smoked a pack of camels a day for 12 years decide he wanted to quit. He wasn't able to. So he switched to American Spirits. After three months of only smoking them, he was than able to quit cold turkey.

I know two other folks who smoked commercial cigarettes for well over 20 years. Both had that "smokers cough."

They switched to American Spirits 2 years ago, and neither of them have their smoker's cough anymore.

It's enough to make me wonder...is it really tobacco (i.e. nicotine) that is so addictive...or is it one or more of those 599 additives that cause such an intense addiction?

But putting that debate aside, I also did a little research awhile ago regarding cigar smoking - even though I was enjoying the occasional cigar with my whisky, I still worried about the health effects even an occasional smoke might cause...which of course is probably the result of all the anti-smoking propaganda we are all exposed to everyday.

The benefits of smoking tobacco have been common knowledge for centuries. From sharpening mental acuity to maintaining optimal weight, the relatively small risks of smoking have always been outweighed by the substantial improvement to mental and physical health. Hysterical attacks on tobacco notwithstanding, smokers always weigh the good against the bad and puff away or quit according to their personal preferences. Now the same anti-tobacco enterprise that has spent billions demonizing the pleasure of smoking is providing additional reasons to smoke. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Tourette's Syndrome, even schizophrenia and cocaine addiction are disorders that are alleviated by tobacco. Add in the still inconclusive indication that tobacco helps to prevent colon and prostate cancer and the endorsement for smoking tobacco by the medical establishment is good news for smokers and non-smokers alike. Of course the revelation that tobacco is good for you is ruined by the pharmaceutical industry's plan to substitute the natural and relatively inexpensive tobacco plant with their overpriced and ineffective nicotine substitutions. Still, when all is said and done, the positive revelations regarding tobacco are very good reasons indeed to keep lighting those cigarettes.

Seeing this book review caused me to googled up this Dr. Douglass, and I found his website, which upon first glance, I believe this guy is right up my alley in terms of anti-conventional wisdom medical and nutritional beliefs. Anti-saturated fat hysteria? Check. Anti-Statins, not worried about cholesterol levels? Check. Anti-Carbohydrate and Sugar diet? Check. Anti-Fluoridated drinking water? Check. Anti-pasteurization of milk? Check. Anti-Big Pharma and Big-Agriculture? Check.

Why...I think this guy may actually know what he's talking about...

There's another book I found while googling, that also offers some compelling evidence that much of the anti-tobacco hysteria is founded on biased studies, lies and propaganda to serve special interests purposes rather than the supposed concern for public health, In Defense of Smokers.

Another interesting theory I came upon, was the idea that tobacco use helps people regulate there weight, because nicotine may help people access the free fatty acids stored in their fat cells...

It brought home to me Gary Taubes' comment about nicotine releasing free fatty acids from adipocytes to allow humans access to the energy stored in their fat cells. Nicotine is an archetypal slimming drug.

Everyone knows about the common lament of the weight gains long-time cigarette smokers experience once they quit...the Blog author of the previously linked post elaborated in his comment section:

Taubes suggest the weight gain normally occurs in the first month after quitting and is utterly independent of caloric intake. People snack more because they no longer have easy access to their adipose tissue. Gotta get energy from somewhere, even if it's just for basal metabolism.

Very interesting.

I myself don't smoke cigarettes.

It was only in the last 3 years that I've begun to occasionally smoke cigars...and that, only premium cigars, which are of course only made with 100% tobacco - and also, I don't inhale.

It's been rather interesting to note the mild, pleasant feelings the nicotine dose from puffing on a cigar gives...and yet, I've never once felt an "addictive" need from it. I've gone months without a smoke...and on binges where I've had several cigars over the course of a few days. I've never come close to experiencing the sort of addiction I've seen many a cigarette smoker experience.

There is a difference between abuse of tobacco and its responsible use. Responsible use of tobacco dates back thousands of years. The Pre-Columbus use of tobacco was widespread throughout the North and South American continents. Having thousands of years of experience with tobacco, Native Americans were able to develop a manner of tobacco use that was not abusive. Those who enjoy fine cigars often share something in common with ancient Native Americans: a manner of smoking tobacco that is non-abusive.

I concur...but I also think that the 599 additives added to commercial cigarettes also constitutes abuse of tobacco as well...

Tobacco was used in North and South American continents, long before Caesar's Roman Empire, and used not in an addictive manner, but with great ceremony. In the Court of Montezuma there were two classes of smokers: those who used pipes, and those who rolled the first cigars -- but smoking had a defined place. When tobacco use is regulated by ceremony, and not by an "urge" or a "desire" you have the means for an internal regulation of the activity.

The scourge of cigarettes may very well have been the true Montezuma's revenge. It is ironic that while Europeans joked that Indians could not handle whiskey, the Indians joked that Europeans could not handle tobacco. Europeans, in a typical response, attempted to ban tobacco, or regulate it, or shame people out of using it -- and that was 400 years ago -- things have not changed. They also attempted to tax it, for which there were great rebellions, or to monopolize it, and even execute those who used it. Some anti-smoker types would probably be interested to note the penalties of Czar Alexis: the first use of tobacco resulted in whipping, a slit nose, and exile to Siberia, and the second offense resulted in execution!

I believe that cigarettes provide a form of consuming tobacco that is inconsistent with the moderate, non-abusive examples set by Native Americans, an example which is more easily reproduced in cigar and pipe smoking. Cigarettes are provided in a "dose pack" of 20. They burn quickly, are inhaled, and provide rapid release of nicotine into the blood stream. Cigarettes rapidly become addictive, and are smoked in an addictive manner: frequently throughout the day and night and because of a physical need to smoke. Cigarette smoking easily becomes a habit, an addiction, and is considered a disease to be treated by physicians. The cigarette smoker is always looking for the place to have their next cigarette; their life being ruled by their addiction.

In contrast, most cigar and pipe smokers have established simple rituals of tobacco, utilizing it and enjoying it without abuse. They limit the use of tobacco to specific times and places, in part because cigars take a long time to smoke. Since most cigars cannot be readily smoked throughout the day, but require ample time and a location that is conducive, cigar smoking is most often limited to periodic consumption and is therefore commonly a self-regulated and moderated activity.

Tobacco cannot be regulated without seriously jeopardizing the basic civil and constitutional rights of the people.

This last point, is in fact what I believe to be the real impetus of the anti-smoking Puritan-styled propaganda that has permeated our mass media culture.